Jason Row

[reposted]

I wanted to upgrade my old blog, which was running .Text, to the new CS 2.1 beta2 candidate.  Since I hadn't played with Community Server at all I hadn't realized how the paths worked for Blogs, Photos, Files, etc but I did know that I wanted to keep the URL http://jason-row.blogdns.com/blog/ for my individual blog since I've been using is for 2+ years already.

Once I did the install/uninstall/reinstall dance a few times I figured out that individual blogs are really not supported out of the box but I found Dan Bartels article CS2 Blogging at the root and I managed to get things configured quite nicely.  I'm posting the highlights here as a reminder for myself.

Essentially there are 3 steps.

Step 1:

In the communityServer.config...  you need to set the "defaultApplicationKey" property for blogs to be that of your single blog...

<Weblog
defaultTheme = "default" enableSkinCache = "true" enableThemes = "true"
aggregatePostSize = "250" createDirectories = "true" enableCommentRedirects = "true"
servicePostCountLimit = "25" aggregatePostCount = "25" individualPostCount = "15"
defaultApplicationKey="DanB">

This will allow CS to use that applicaiton key if none is provided on the querystring (or in the path)

Step 2:

Next, you can remove the application key from the CS paths, by editing the "##blogdirectory##" transformer in the SiteUrls.config....  just set it to an empty string, and your applicaiton key, will now be coming from the default..  (Note the XML attributes / tags mentioned here are case senative)

<add key = "##blogdirectory##" value = "" />

Step 3:

Finally, you need to update the "location" tag for blogs in the SiteUrls.config file ...  This is supported through use of a "physicalPath" attribute.

<location name="weblogs" path="/" physicalPath="/blogs/" type="CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.SingleBlogLocation, CommunityServer.Blogs" />

Since I wanted to use /blog/ in my URL I changed things to

<location name="weblogs" path="/blog/" physicalPath="/blogs/" type="CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.SingleBlogLocation, CommunityServer.Blogs" />

Upgrading to CS 2.1 Final Release

I wasn't sure how easy this was going to be but I went with the "Copy the files in the Web folder to the root of your web site" option instead of creating a new folder and it worked out fine. I just had to repeat the steps above again.

I think there's still some wonkiness with various paths (http://jason-row.blogdns.com/blogs/ is still a valid URL) and I'm sure there's a better way to configure things but I didn't have much time to spend on this. I'm happy that my blog is back up and running so now I can post once again.  Speaking of posting, I think I have to do a post on configuring BlogJet and Windows Live Writer to work with this setup, it's been a fair bit of trial and error with that as well.